The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 80 pps

This scepticism may be influenced by the thought that, from the fact that quantum mechanics lacks an adequate formalization in classical logic, it hardly follows that there must be some o

the right to enforce the morality prevailing within it,

irre-spective of the critical soundness of that morality, for the

sake of preserving social cohesion H L A Hart

coun-tered that Devlin’s ‘social disintegration thesis’ was either

an empty ‘conceptual’ thesis which trivially identifies

soci-ety with whatever moral views happen at the moment to

be dominant in a community, or else it was an ‘empirical’

thesis which historical evidence fails to vindicate

Contemporary defenders of morals legislation typically

eschew Devlin’s approach in favour of the traditional

jus-tification of morals legislation under which its primary

purpose is not social cohesion per se, but, rather, the

pro-tection of morally good character against the corrupting

influences of vice Thus, they reject Devlin’s *relativism

and understand the critical soundness of a moral

judge-ment to be a necessary condition of its justified legal

*liberalism; liberty; toleration; public–private

distinc-tion; enforcement of morals

Patrick Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals (London, 1965).

Robert P George, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public

Morality (Oxford, 1993).

H L A Hart, Law, Liberty, and Morality (Stanford, Calif., 1963).

D A J Richards, Sex, Drugs, Death, and the Law (Totowa, NJ,

1982)

public–private distinction Privacy is an important,

though a recent and by no means a universal, value

Analyses of it are dominated by liberal conceptions of a

‘private sphere’ which sets normative and empirical limits

to state and social power over the individual In his private

life the individual is not and should not be regulated by

laws or subject to social pressure; in public life he shares,

assents to, or anyway obeys, norms and laws governing

his relations with others, and accepts social and political

authority

Conceptions of the boundary between public and

private have altered Economic relations have been

under-stood to be private, and their legal regulation resisted

Now ‘the family’ epitomizes the private sphere However,

the implication that family relations are not and should not

be regulated by the state or subject to shared, publicly

accepted standards of morality is contested e.j.f

*liberalism; liberty; public morality

Carole Pateman, ‘Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private

Dichotomy’, in S Benn and G Gaus (eds.), Public and Private in

Social Life (London, 1983); repr in Carole Pateman, The

Dis-order of Women (Cambridge, 1989).

publishing philosophy.The Greek word for bookseller

dates from the time of Plato, who foreshadowed the

alliance between philosophers and publishers when he

prescribed his own work the Laws as the set text for study

in the ideal city it describes Cicero’s friend Atticus was

one of those who made a business of the copying and

dis-tribution of books in the ancient world In the early

Roman Empire some books were priced as low as six

ses-terces; Cicero had claimed that a feeble slave could earn

three sesterces a day at Rome Nor did mass production await the age of printing: the emperor Constantine ordered multiple copies of works by Christian writers for dissemination through his empire

At some medieval universities students were required

to own copies of their teacher’s lectures, and they might pay someone to supply them with a copy In 1304, thirty

years after Aquinas’s death, his Quaestiones disputatae de veritate could be rented from a Paris bookseller for four

shillings But, since the work runs to more than a thou-sand pages, a substantial burden of labour remained Aquinas’s output of eight million words in thirty years is equivalent, in today’s terms, to two substantial mono-graphs per annum and a few journal articles too

Descartes moved to Leiden in 1636 specifically to be at the centre of publishing The liberal Dutch laws had allowed the Elseviers to become the leading publishers of the time; they numbered Galileo among their authors, and had expressed interest in Descartes’s work But they

‘made difficulties’ for him, and so it was their neighbour Jan Maire who became known to posterity as the

pub-lisher of the Discours The print run was 3,000, out of

which Descartes received 200 free copies

The late seventeenth century saw the flourishing of learned journals Until 1710, that was where one had to look to find Leibniz’s work: he first published his ‘New

System’ in 1695 in the Journal des savants (the official organ

of the French Academy of Sciences, founded in 1666); he also wrote in Latin for such journals as the Leipzig-based

Acta eruditorum.

Spinoza dared not let his greatest work, the Ethics, be

published while he was alive, and sought refuge in

pseudo-nymy for his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus of 1670; just as

well, since it was generally considered blasphemous More surprising, perhaps, that Kant too was the author of

a banned book: in 1794 King Frederick William II’s Spiritual Affairs Commission issued an order forbidding

professors to lecture on his Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason Kant had published it under the imprint of

the Königsberg philosophy faculty in order to avoid censorship

The three greatest works of English-language philoso-phy were published in London Thomas Hobbes

entrusted his Leviathan to Andrew Crooke, who was to be

found at the sign of the Green Dragon in the precinct of

St Paul’s cathedral The controversy over the book both aroused demand and made the publisher nervous about satisfying it, with the result that the price rose from eight and a half shillings in 1651 to thirty in 1668, before settling

at seventeen in 1692 The notoriety of Leviathan made

publishing difficult for Hobbes: after 1662 he was obliged

to seek a licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury for the publication of any work on politics or society; and in

the case of Behemoth this was refused, even though the

work was a favourite of the king

Thirty-eight years after Leviathan, Locke’s Essay was first

printed by Elizabeth Holt in 1689 for the publisher Thomas Bassett, at the George in Fleet Street, just down the road

770 public morality

from St Paul’s Locke had signed a contract with Bassett in

May 1689; printing began immediately, and copies were on

sale by the end of the year By 1700 the book was in its fifth

edition, with another publisher, the rights having been

sold on twice before the second edition

The first two books of Hume’s Treatise were published

by John Noon in 1739, at the White Hart in Cheapside, on

the other side of the cathedral Noon specialized in

philoso-phy and religion, and paid Hume £50 for the right to print

an edition of no more than 1,000 copies By the time the

third book appeared in the following year, Thomas

Long-man had already supplanted Noon as publisher Some were

more loyal: the Paris publisher Rey was one of the few

people whom Rousseau did not suspect of scheming

against him, and voluntarily settled an annuity of 300 francs

on Rousseau’s ‘womenfolk’ in grateful acknowledgement

that the publisher owed his prosperity to the philosopher

Up to the middle of the twentieth century, much

phil-osophy publishing in English was undertaken by general

commercial presses, British and American But as

philoso-phy books have become more specialist, they have mainly

been handled by specialist publishers Large commercial

presses like Penguin and Harper Collins occasionally

show interest in the subject, but most philosophy books

are published either by specialists in academic publishing

or by specialists in textbook publishing One or two of the

European giants of science publishing, such as Kluwer of

Dordrecht, dabble in philosophy, usually at the technical

end of the subject where it is most like a science

At the start of the twenty-first century there are two

large commercial presses with a strength in philosophy

Blackwell built on its prestige as publisher of Wittgenstein

and disciples to head the field for a period in the 1980s, but

in the 1990s decided to concentrate mainly on textbook,

reference, and journal publishing Routledge now

pub-lishes a broader range of philosophy than any other press,

having inherited a legacy of works by such as Russell,

Popper, and Wittgenstein from companies that it

swallowed In 1922 Kegan Paul had offered Wittgenstein

no fee and no royalties for the English publication of his

Tractatus; when the author tried to negotiate some money

at the time of a reprint in 1933, he received no reply, and so

that was the end of his dealings with the company In 1998

Routledge was itself taken over by an ancient publishing

company, long moribund, now growing fast: Taylor and

Francis, then still auspiciously located just off Fleet Street

One of the parent company’s founders, Richard Taylor,

had established a pioneering independent academic

journal, the Philosophical Magazine, in 1798.

Most publishers of academic philosophy today are

uni-versity presses, helped or hindered in their business by

their relationships with their parent institutions The

uni-versity presses of Oxford and Cambridge are the largest

and most international of academic philosophy

publish-ers CUP claims to be the oldest university press in the

world, having published its first book in 1584, just in time

for the birth of modern philosophy Their leading

Ameri-can counterparts are Harvard and Princeton; others have

strengths in specific areas—for instance, MIT in cognitive science, Chicago in social and political theory, Cornell in aesthetics and philosophy of religion In 2002 the Univer-sity of California Press withdrew from philosophy pub-lishing, despite the university’s continuing prominence in the subject: increasing difficulties in the academic book market were cited

Charges frequently made against academic publishers are that they encourage the proliferation of books beyond what the readership can cope with, and that they sell back

to universities books that the universities have paid their members to write But it was the universities that built publication into the career structure for academics And any profiteer would be scared off by the margins in phil-osophy publishing

The electronic revolution in publishing is proceeding more slowly than predicted by zealots and Jeremiahs Paper will continue to be the principal commercial medium for philosophy publishing for a while yet, even though informal electronic dissemination has become a staple of philosophical intercourse

Most philosophers who publish several books do not stick with one publisher for all of them; they optimistically hope that the next one will be free of the shortcomings of the last But monogamy is less meaningful when it can only be one-way And a good publishing relationship may even be refreshed by the author’s straying into an unsuit-able dalliance To complicate matters, philosophy editors often turn out to be consorts of philosophers; which of those blessed estates leads to the other varies from case to

Pufendorf, Samuel von (1632–94) German legal and political philosopher A follower, at some distance, of Grotius and Hobbes, he carried on their project of secular-izing matural law Other, less direct, influences were Descartes and Spinoza, from whom he derived a math-ematical ideal of philosophical exposition A Protestant, in his first book he attacked the (Catholic) Holy Roman Empire He served as court librarian to the king of Sweden, during twenty years in that country, and then to the elector of Brandenburg Nevertheless he entertained the idea of a European federation While in Sweden he wrote a history of the country which was exemplary in its

reliance on archival materials His chief work, The Law of Nature and Nations (1672), firmly distinguishes natural law

from divine law He consistently concluded that in terres-trial matters the church should be subordinate to the state Like Althusius, he argues for two contracts: one to form a community out of mere individuals, the other between the community so formed and a ruler Where Hobbes derived the law of nature from our fear of violent death at each others’ hands, Pufendorf more cheerfully deduced it

Leonard Krieger, The Politics of Discretion (Chicago, 1965).

punishment. Since punishment involves intentionally inflicting deprivations on persons by someone with

punishment 771

authority to do so, and since the deprivations themselves

are typically not unlike the harms that crimes cause (fines

are like theft, imprisonment like kidnapping, etc.),

punish-ment has generally been thought to need justification,

especially in a constitutional democracy committed in

theory to the protection of human rights and the values of

individual liberty, privacy, and autonomy Justification

may be undertaken either by reference to extrinsic

(conse-quentialist) considerations, or by reference to intrinsic

(retributive) factors

In an effort to accommodate both retributive and

con-sequentialist norms, some recent theories justify

punish-ment by dividing the issue in a manner reflecting the

different competencies of an ideal legislature and judge

Thus, the primary concern amounts to answering a

legislative question: Why is anyone punished, or made

liable to punishment, in the first place? The secondary

issue is in effect the judicial question: Why is this person

being punished, and in why in this manner?

The former can be answered best by citing the benefits

conferred on a society (family, organization, civil polity)

by the institution of punishment as a permanent, public

threat-system that provides an indispensable incentive to

obey the law In so far as the justification of punishment is

conceived in this manner, it is inescapably

forward-looking, purposive, and consequentialist in nature

(though not necessarily utilitarian)

Assuming such a system to be in place, with its various

offices ( judges, prosecutors) and rules (crimes and

punish-ments defined by statute, due process of law), then the

punishment of a given individual is justified to the extent

that the rules of the system incorporate appropriate

con-straints on trials and sentencing and are correctly applied

to the individual case Central to such rules is the

proced-ure by which the accused is found guilty of a crime on the

basis of suitable evidence weighed in an unbiased manner

If the actual infliction of punishment is understood in this

fashion, it is always backward-looking (resting on the

con-viction and sentencing of a guilty offender) and thus

plausibly viewed as retributive

Retribution accommodated in this narrow manner falls

far short of its role in a full-blown retributive theory of

punishment, such as Kant’s or Hegel’s They appeal to

retributive notions not only to determine who ought to be

punished, but also to determine what punishment the

guilty person deserves and the very rationale for a system

of punishment in the first place Deserved punishment for

the retributivist is equivalent (as in lex talionis) or at least

proportional in its severity to the harm done in the crime

and the culpability of the offender The retributive

ration-ale of a system of punishment is that justice requires

inflicting harm on wrongdoers Whether such an a priori

principle as this can be defended against alternative

(typ-ically consequentialist) principles continues to be debated

The goals or purposes of any system of punishment are

likely to be several and diverse, including vindicating the

law, crime prevention, and offender rehabilitation

Philo-sophical disputes over punishment typically focus on

which goal is to take priority over others and why As Friedrich Nietzsche shrewdly observed, ‘punishment is

overdetermined by utilities of every kind’ (Genealogy of Morals,ii 14) He failed to note that the penalty sched-ule—the actual ordering of crimes ranked in their gravity with punishments ranked in their severity—is under-determined by every theory of punishment The two-tiered theory described above can reasonably claim to offer the most hospitable accommodation to the diverse relevant principles, but it provides no solution to this

*capital punishment; desert

R A Duff, Trials and Punishments (Cambridge, 1986).

—— and D Garland (eds.), A Reader on Punishment (Oxford, 1995) David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Chicago, 1990).

Ted Honderich, Punishment: The Supposed Justifications

(Cam-bridge, 1989)

C L Ten, Crime, Guilt, and Punishment (Oxford, 1987).

punishment, capital: see capital punishment.

pushpin and poetry is a critical slogan popularized by J S Mill in criticism of the work of Bentham (Pushpin was a primitive game which involved shoving pins.) Mill cites Bentham as holding that *poetry is no more valuable than pushpin, if they give the same amount of *pleasure This is

in accord with the principle of *utility However, Ben-tham’s point when he made the remark was not about pri-vate value but that the two activities should be equally worthy of governmental subsidy if they give the same

J Bentham, The Rationale of Reward (London, 1825), 206.

J S Mill, ‘Bentham’, in Works,x 113

Putnam, Hilary (1926– ) Harvard philosopher, trained originally in the tradition of *Logical Positivism, especially

by Rudolph Carnap Putnam later came under the influ-ence of such philosophers as W V Quine, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Nelson Goodman In the process, he strayed from the fold, and eventually became a severe critic

of that movement Against positivism, he argues that there

is no privileged foundation (e.g *sense-data) to our know-ledge, no fixed principle of verifiability, no *fact–value dis-tinction as the positivists characterized it, and that sentences (our beliefs) cannot be assessed as true or false individually (i.e *holism rather than atomism is correct) Putnam is also a critic of another foundationalist pos-ition, which he calls metaphysical realism All God’s eye

points of view that claim to give us the account of the

Fur-niture of the World are wrong-headed whether they come from a relativist–positivist or a realist–materialist perspec-tive His own ‘middle’ position he characterizes as ‘inter-nal realism’ It is a kind of latter-day *Kantianism that talks about the (real) world, but does so always within the framework of our mind (concepts, sets of beliefs, commit-ments) His position, Putnam claims, characterizes the objectivity of both science and ethics better than do the

772 punishment

extreme positions he opposes If anything, these extreme

views undermine rather than support objectivity

Of late, Putnam has rejected *functionalism, the theory

that mental states are computational states—a theory he

himself founded earlier in his career Of late he has also

written about matters of ethics and politics Like his views

in metaphysics and epistemology, he tends to want to

hold a middle, yet somewhat liberal, position between

two extremes—although he confesses there were times

(e.g during the Vietnam War) when he flirted with

Marx-ism, a position he now finds extreme n.f

*verification principle

Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.,

1988)

—— Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).

—— Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).

Pyrrho(4th–3rd century bc) A citizen, and priest, of Elis,

identified (through the writings of Timon of Phlius) as the

first representative of ‘Pyrrhonian *scepticism’, the

refusal to commit oneself to any positive belief Anecdotes

were told of his indifference to disaster (and his friends’

saving him from accidental falls) He was said to have

accompanied Alexander to the borders of India and

learned this detachment from the ‘gymnosophists’, or

naked philosophers Like Diogenes the *Cynic he pointed

to animals as living undisturbed, and enviable, lives: a pig

on board ship during a severe storm continued to eat

while people (except Pyrrho) panicked Mocked for being

alarmed by a fierce dog, he conceded that it was hard to

strip off human nature, but attempted to maintain

tran-quillity by balancing any plausible-sounding thesis with its

plausible opposite, and binding himself to nature, custom,

impulse, and craft-discipline without affirming any thesis

Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede (eds.), The Original Sceptics: A

Controversy (New York, 1997).

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, tr R D Hicks

(London, 1925)

Pyrrhonism. A sceptical tradition whose leading figure

was Pyrrho of Elis (c.365–270bc), but handed down to us

in the works of Sextus Empiricus Pyrrho argued that the

reasons in favour of a belief are never better than those

against (isostheneia—a situation of equal strength), and

that the only possible response to this is to stop worrying

(ataraxia) and to live by the appearances He suggested

that this life would have a lot to recommend it; critics

maintained that it would be very uncomfortable, at best

The question who was right depends on what is meant by

‘live by the appearances’

Sextus’ work was rediscovered in the mid-sixteenth

century; the sceptical concerns of Montaigne and

Descartes are a direct response, though Cartesian

scepti-cism seems to be directed more against the possibility of

knowledge than against the possibility of having better

reasons in favour of some belief than against it j.d

*scepticism, history of; scepticism

J Annas and J Barnes (eds.), The Modes of Scepticism: Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations (Cambridge, 1985).

Pythagoras(c.550–c.500bc) An elusive figure who may have been an intellectual catalyst Little is known of his life; authentic detail has been drowned in the many legends and tendentious later ‘reconstructions’ of his activities A polymath and a charismatic figure, he emigrated from his native Samos to southern Italy, where

he founded a sect characterized by common beliefs and observances These included prescriptive rules (such as a ban on the eating of beans and certain meats), the preservation and pursuit of esoteric knowledge, and reverence for the founder himself

Modern scepticism about the alleged political, philo-sophical, mathematical, and scientific achievements of Pythagoras is mostly justifiable The earliest sources pre-sent him primarily as a magician claiming ‘occult’ or mys-tical experiences like those of a Siberian shaman On this basis he asserted ‘metempsychosis’, a doctrine of repeated incarnations of souls, with punishments and rewards for behaviour in previous lives

Apart from this, no definite meaning attaches to the term ‘(early) Pythagorean’ The original society did not last long, but throughout the fifth century bc (and even after) various theorists in the western Greek world were called ‘Pythagoreans’ Many of these were interested in mathematics and astronomy, and their cosmic or occult significance; the interest may go back to Pythagoras him-self Some apparently attempted to reduce all knowledge

to mathematics (using such identifications as ‘Justice is the number 4’) Systematic dualism of associated polarities (right = male = good, left = female = bad, etc.) is also attested Pythagorean influence, in this wider sense, appears in Parmenides and Empedocles, and later in Plato

*Pythagoreanism

W Burkert, Lore and Science in Early Pythagoreanism, tr E L.

Minar (Cambridge, Mass., 1972)

Pythagoreanism.Way of life and doctrines attributed to Pythagoras There were proponents of Pythagoreanism for at least eight centuries from Pythagoras’ day, but there was no persisting core of Pythagorean doctrines From the fourth century bc onwards, teachings from other schools were borrowed and regularly attributed to Pythagoras himself This, together with our lack of early writings, makes it hard to discover the original nature of the school There was, reportedly, an early split between those for whom Pythagoreanism was a way of life, something like a religion, and those for whom it was a body of scientific, mathematical, and philosophical teaching The ethical and religious teachings were broadly puritanical, often bizarre, and of little philosophical interest Pythagorean contribu-tions to geometry were reputedly great, but their extent is uncertain Aristotle records some of the philosophical doctrines, notably that numbers are ‘the first things in the

Pythagoreanism 773

whole of nature’, and that ‘the elements of numbers are the

elements of all things’ Pythagoreans knew that

concord-ant musical intervals (octave, fourth, and fifth) could be

expressed by arithmetical ratios This may have led them

to believe that the universe as a whole could be explained

and understood in mathematical terms—an idea that has

since proved remarkably fruitful But Aristotle understood

their theory as confused: they represented things as

composed of numbers, and failed to ‘separate’ the numbers

from the things numbered Aristotle may be right about

the crudeness of early Pythagorean thought But there is

earlier evidence of some subtlety of argument

Philolaus (born c.470bc) was the first to write down

Pythagorean doctrines, and a few fragments of his work

survive Among his conclusions are that the ‘being’ of

things is eternal, and ‘admits of divine, but not human,

knowledge’; and that ‘all the things that are known have

number’ Evidently he held that human knowledge was

possible only of things that can be numbered His

reason-ing seems to be this Anythreason-ing that can be known must

have limits (spatial or temporal) to distinguish it from

everything else But things thus distinguishable from one

another may be counted The universe as we know it, then,

must consist of things that can be counted He also argued

that the universe must contain ‘limiting things’ and

‘unlimited things’, united by ‘harmony’ Perhaps he

thought that only if things of one sort had imposed limits

on things of the other could there be ‘things with limits’

(and hence knowable things) But his words are obscure

and their interpretation disputed

Some early Pythagoreans believed that the soul was an

‘attunement’, like that of a lyre This suggests that to have

a soul is to have one’s bodily components related to one another in a certain (mathematically expressible) way This, however, seems inconsistent with the well-attested Pythagorean belief in reincarnation

Plato’s successors attributed much of his thought to

Pythagoras No doubt Plato was influenced by

Pythagor-eans, for example, in his views on immortality in the

Phaedo and his exercise in mathematical cosmology in Timaeus, but his philosophical debt was probably small.

After Plato, ‘Pythagoreanism’ became in effect a brand of Platonism, with emphasis on number theory and the more mystical aspects of his thought

In the first century bc there was a revival of the school (often called neo-Pythagoreanism), from which many writings survive These contain a medley of teachings from various schools What marks them as Pythagorean is their religious rather than their philosophical content: miracle stories, a reverence for numbers and concern with

an ascetic way of living

Pythagoreanism influenced the development of

*Neo-platonism, and in writers such as Iamblichus (c.ad 300) the two schools became indistinguishable r.j.h

W Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism

(Cam-bridge, Mass., 1972)

W K C Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, i (Cambridge,

1967), 146–340

H Thesleff, An Introduction to Pythagorean Writings of the Hellenistic Period (Åbo, 1965).

774 Pythagoreanism

qualia. The subjective qualities of conscious experience

(plural of the Latin singular quale, ‘of what kind’) Examples

are the way sugar tastes, the way vermilion looks, the way

coffee smells, the way a cat’s purr sounds, the way it feels to

stub your toe Accounting for these features of mental states

has been one of the biggest obstacles to materialist solutions

to the mind–body problem, because it seems impossible to

analyse the subjective character of these phenomena, which

are comprehensible only from the point of view of certain

types of conscious being, in objective physical terms which

are comprehensible to any rational individual

independ-ently of his particular sensory faculties t.n

*subjectivity; consciousness, its irreducibility

T Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, Philosophical Review (1974).

qualities.In ‘Napoleon had all the qualities of a great

gen-eral’ we could, in everyday usage, substitute ‘features’,

‘properties’, ‘traits’, ‘characteristics’, ‘attributes’, and

some other terms, for ‘qualities’ Aristotle included

‘qual-ity’ in his list of ‘categories’ of the various possible kinds of

objects of thought He said ‘By “quality” I mean that in

virtue of which people are said to be such and such.’

How-ever, he goes on to discuss qualities of things other than

people, such as the sweetness of honey

A quality is something which can be possessed, as, for

example, Napoleon possessed the quality of courage

Qualities can also be attributed, as the quality of courage

was just attributed to Napoleon Furthermore, the same

quality may be possessed by more than one thing, as, for

example, Alexander possessed courage just as Napoleon

did, and in a very different way from the common

posses-sion of a yacht by joint owners or of a spouse by

polyg-amists And a quality can be attributed to a number of

things, truly or falsely

These qualities of qualities, their possessability by, and

attributability to, numbers of things, have made them

puzzling to many philosophers, who find it peculiar that

there should be things with those qualities One source of

puzzlement seems to arise from finding it incredible that

one and the same thing could be understood and

attrib-uted by several different minds and also possessed by or

‘in’ several different things Locke says ‘a snowball having

the power to produce in us the ideas of white cold and

round,—the power to produce those ideas in us, as they are in the snowball, I call qualities; and as they are sensa-tions or percepsensa-tions in our understandings, I call them ideas’ Jonathan Bennett points out that the interpretation

of the pronoun ‘they’ in this passage, as referring back either (ungrammatically) to ‘power’ or to ‘ideas’ raises problems The quality, say round, is both identified with the idea round, and distinguished from it

Locke then goes on to speak of a subclass of ‘qualities which are nothing in the objects themselves, but pow-ers to produce sensations in us’ as ‘secondary qualities’ Secondary qualities, then, are qualities which are ‘nothing but’ qualities ‘Primary’ qualities of a body, by contrast, have further qualities such as being ‘utterly inseparable from the body’ It was held further that the idea of a

*pri-mary quality resembles the quality, while the idea of a

sec-ondary quality does not

These distinctions, or attempts at them, make verifica-tionism about qualities hard to resist, since the notion of

an undetectable quality is hard to square with the quality

of being a power to produce an idea If we say that the idea produced needn’t convey any idea of the quality, then Locke’s project of explaining how we understand qualities

in order to attribute them is undermined This problem as

to how the idea points to the quality also arises in connec-tion with what Locke calls a ‘third sort’ of qualities, which are powers in one object to produce powers in another which then reach us For example, a quality in the sun causes the mercury to rise in a thermometer A primitive man may get from the thermometer the idea of a red col-umn rising, but with no idea at all of the sun’s role The view that it is an essential quality of a quality that it produce some distinctive sort of idea in us ought to be

given up It may be true of sensory qualities, such as red, or

cold have been held to be, though even that is

*properties; properties, individual; universal

Aristotle, Categories.

Jonathan Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes (Oxford,

1971), 27–8

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,ii viii

quality of life (QOL) in a population is often defined in terms of social indicators such as nutrition, air quality,

Q

incidence of disease, crime rates, health care, educational

services, divorce rates, etc The difficulty is in knowing how

to weigh these factors Is clean drinking-water more or less

important than good schools? Should a high divorce rate be

counted negatively? One way of achieving a unified index

would be to define QOL as a subjective measure of

per-ceived satisfaction or dissatisfaction, summed over a

mem-bers of the population But it is possible to conceive of

circumstances in which perceived satisfaction could vary

quite independently of what we regard as QOL Even Ivan

Denisovitch, in his Siberian labour camp, went to bed a

‘sat-isfied’ man A third alternative is to define QOL in terms not

of perceived happiness but of the availability of happiness

requirements: what human beings need in order to be

happy If requirements such as Maslow’s need hierarchy

can be found which are universal rather than idiosyncratic,

an objective definition of QOL is possible s.mcc

*well-being

S McCall, ‘Quality of Life’, Social Indicators Research (1975).

A H Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York, 1954).

M Nussbaum and A Sen (eds.), The Quality of Life (Oxford, 1993).

quantification. The application of quantifiers (for

example: ‘all’, ‘some’, ‘a few’, ‘more than half ’) In predicate

logic, the prefacing of a sentence by either the universal

quantifier (∀x), ‘For any x’, or the existential quantifier

(∃x), ‘There exists at least one x such that’ Quantification

turns a sentence with free variables into a sentence with

bound variables, for example: Fx, ‘Something is F’, into

(∃x) Fx, ‘There exists at least one x that is F’ The propriety

of the universal and existential quantifiers is not beyond

philosophical question The use of the universal quantifier

assimilates ‘all’, ‘any’, and ‘every’, which are arguably

dis-tinct concepts The use of the existential quantifier

enshrines formally the doctrine that ‘exists’ is not a

order predicate, but ‘exists’ might be some kind of

Martin Davies, Meaning, Quantification, Necessity: Themes in

Philo-sophical Logic (London, 1981).

Mark Sainsbury, Logical Forms (Oxford, 1991), ch 4.

quantifier.A logical symbol used to do roughly the same

work as ‘every’ or ‘some’ The word ‘quantifier’, which

stems from the logicians’ sense of *‘quantity’, was first

used by Peirce in 1883, but the idea is present in Frege’s

Begriffsschrift (1879) Combined with *variables,

quanti-fiers provide an adequate symbolism for representing

rela-tional propositions involving both the universal (∀, read

‘for every’), and the existential (∃, read ‘for some’),

quanti-fier: ‘Someone is loved by everybody’, can mean either ‘

∀x∃y(y is loved by x)’ or ‘∃x∀y(x is loved by y)’

*Ambigu-ity is thus avoided by quantifier notation Quine

chris-tened two interpretations of the quantifiers ‘objectual’

and ‘substitutional’, respectively The first gives the

*truth-condition for, for example, ‘∃x(x is heavy)’ as ‘ “x is

heavy” is satisfied by some object’, the second as ‘Some

sentence of the form “x is heavy” is true’. c.j.f.w

C J F Williams, What is Existence? (Oxford, 1981), chs 6–8.

quantity and quality From at least the thirteenth century

onwards, that a proposition is *universal (‘All S are P’ and

‘No S are P’) or *particular (‘Some S are P’ and ‘Some S are not P’) was called its quantity; and that it is affirmative (‘All

S are P’ and ‘Some S are P’) or negative (‘No S are P’ and

‘Some S are not P’) was traditionally called its quality.

c.w

*logic, traditional

I M Bochenski, A History of Formal Logic, tr and ed I Thomas

(Indiana, 1961), 210–11

quantum logic.Originating with von Neumann and Birk-hoff in the mid-1930s, the name ‘quantum logic’ denotes

an intepretation of quantum experimental results by means of a non-Boolean lattice According to some critics, the name is misleading They see von Neumann and Birk-hoff as having shown that the mathematics, not the logic,

of the quantum realm has this non-classical character More generally, the idea of a quantum logic has both a negative and a positive part Negatively, it is the thesis that classical, e.g first-order, formalization of quantum physics is one in which certain principles of logic cease to

be valid More particularly, classical laws of logic, such as distributivity, fail under any formalization in which atomic formulae of quantum physics are formalized as truth-functionally atomic formulae of classical logic and,

likewise, if the quantum ‘connectives’ of meet and join are

construed truth-functionally Further factors that impede classical formalization include the apparent failure of quantum objects to be well individuated and the inher-ently probabilistic character of quantum claims The posi-tive part of the quantum logic thesis requires the specification of a suitably non-classical logic to fit the quantum realm There is as yet no settled consensus among those who favour the idea For those who don’t, a purpose-built logic for quantum physics has no more rationale than a purpose-built logic for household eco-nomics This scepticism may be influenced by the thought that, from the fact that quantum mechanics lacks an adequate formalization in classical logic, it hardly follows that there must be some other non-classical logic in which

M Dalla Chiaro and Roberto Giuntini, ‘Quantum Logics’ in

D M Gabbay and F Guenthner (eds.), vol 6 of Handbook of Philosophical Logic, 2nd edn (Dordrecht, 2000).

quantum mechanics, philosophical problems of These concern how best to interpret the theory, and are still being pursued, as in the famous Bohr–Einstein debates in the 1930s, through the use of various ‘thought’ experi-ments designed to play off one interpretation against another The problems still receiving most attention, first raised in classic 1935 papers by Einstein and Schrödinger, are the question whether quantum mechanics is a com-plete theory—does it ‘say all there is to say’ about physical reality?—and the measurement problem, or the paradox

of Schrödinger’s *cat

776 quality of life

Both problems arise in response to the superposition

principle in quantum mechanics, which is what

distin-guishes the theory most from Newtonian mechanics This

principle says that if a physical magnitude M is assigned a

definite value m1when a quantum system is in state ψ1, and

similarly if the (distinct) value m2is assigned by the state ψ2

to the system, then there are also states of the system

achieved by combining ψ1andψ2in which M has no

def-inite value whatsoever! To see the peculiarity of the

situ-ation, just let M be position and m1be ‘the particle is here’

while m2is ‘the particle is over there’ The way in which ψ1

and ψ2 are combined, or superposed, determines the

respective probabilities that a *measurement of M will be

found to yield m1or m2 And this superposition of states

extends to composite systems: two particles can be in limbo

between, say, both having value m1and both m2, with equal

probabilities of finding them with either combination

The completeness problem starts from the worry that

superpositions might not really indicate that magnitudes

fail to have definite values, but just that quantum

mechan-ics is not able to tell us what the true values are and so

resorts to predicting only what values we would probably

find if we looked In fact Einstein (with his collaborators

Podolsky and Rosen) argued that quantum predictions

themselves give reasons for thinking this Consider a pair

of widely separated particles emitted from a source in

opposite directions in a superposed state like the one

men-tioned at the end of the last paragraph Since there are only

two possibilities—that both particles will be found to have

value m1or both m2—and they have equal probability,

once we have measured the M-value of one of the

par-ticles, say particle A, we can predict with certainty the

M-value of particle B (since it must be the same) Now

surely such a prediction gives us good reason to attribute a

definite M-value to B (whether it turns out to be m1or m2)

And surely the A measurement could not bring that value

into existence, since it would be performed at great

dis-tance from particle B, and so could not affect it without

influences travelling faster than light Thus B must

actu-ally have had a definite M-value all along, despite the fact

that it started out locked in a superposition with A!

Tantalizing though this argument is, it is not sound For

in 1964 Bell cleverly showed that, even if we accept its

conclusion of incompleteness, we must still invoke some

sort of faster-than-light influence to reproduce the

quan-tum predictions—so, in this context, the completeness

issue turns out to be a red herring! But this pushes us to still

other problems, such as whether the required

faster-than-light influences are truly causal influences, and

whether they can be tolerated by relativity theory (even

given that we know they cannot be exploited to transmit a

signal faster than light) The debate continues to rage

The other main problem raised by superpositions

per-tains to measurement We may be happy with

indefinite-ness of values as long as it is consigned to the micro-realm;

but there is as yet no principled way in quantum

mechan-ics to prevent it from infecting the everyday world of

macroscopic objects, like tables and chairs Suppose we set

up a device whereby if a radioactive atom decays it sets off

a chain reaction terminating in the death of a cat, whereas

if it does not decay the cat lives—so the cat’s state of being functions as our device for measuring the state of the atom The law governing the time evolution of quantum states then requires that when the atom evolves into a superposition of ‘decayed’ and ‘not decayed’ it drags the cat’s state with it, and together they end up in limbo between ‘decayed–dead’ and ‘not decayed–alive’ Not only do we not get an answer from our (now admittedly perverse) measurement of whether the atom has in fact decayed, but we are left saying that much-cherished prop-erties of everyday macroscopic beings do not exist! There is of course no problem here if quantum mechanics is incomplete But those who think otherwise have been hard pressed to resolve the problem Some say quantum evolution somehow gets temporarily sus-pended so that any unwanted superposition between macroscopically distinguishable states ‘collapses’ into one

or the other of its components ψ1andψ2; others search for

a precise mechanism for this collapse, which only operates when systems are sufficiently macroscopic; and still others refuse to acknowledge the problem by arguing that the difference between the collapsed and uncollapsed state of

a macroscopic object is so difficult to detect experimen-tally that ‘for all practical purposes’ we can live with the superpositions the theory predicts This list in no way exhausts the avenues that have been pursued, and none has yet come out on top

The two problems outlined above are far from being the only ones; perhaps they are not even the most inter-esting But others peculiar to relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory (like problems to do with particle localization and identity), though increas-ingly being addressed by philosophers, would involve too much mathematics to elaborate here r.cli

*determinism, scientific

D Z Albert, Quantum Mechanics and Experience (Cambridge,

Mass., 1992)

J S Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics

(Cam-bridge, 1987)

J T Cushing and E McMullin (eds.), Philosophical Consequences of Quantum Theory (Notre Dame, Ind., 1989).

quantum theory and philosophy. The philosophical issues raised by quantum theory are largely dependent upon how *quantum mechanics is interpreted in order to minimize the philosophical problems that arise within the theory, which is a matter of ongoing controversy

1 The fact that there are mutually incompatible quan-tum theories, each with a claim to being empirically adequate, presents difficulties for realist interpretations of quantum mechanics which maintain that theoretical terms refer to objectively existing features of the world Which theory is the correct one? Since empirical adequacy rules out an experimental basis for this choice, it has been suggested that *anti-realism or *instrumentalism about

quantum theory and philosophy 777

quantum entities or laws should be adopted, a view which

may find application in other areas of science

2 Quantum theory is often presumed to provide a strong

counter-example to the truth of *determinism The

loca-tion of an electron (say) can best be described in terms of

the probability of its being found at a particular location,

the shape and evolution of such probabilities, known as

wave-functions, being governed by the Schrödinger

equa-tion However, if a measurement of location is made, we

do not observe the electron to be in a superposition of

pos-sible states: the electron will be found at a particular

loca-tion, and it is no longer possible for it to be anywhere else

Thus, von Neumann postulated that Schrödinger

evolu-tion is interrupted and the wave-funcevolu-tion ‘collapses’, it is

discontinuously and indeterministically reduced to a

par-ticle-like state

The postulated collapse of the wave-function is more

problematic for determinism than Schrödinger evolution,

since according to the latter, the state of a system is

uniquely determined by any earlier state But, even if

indeterministic collapse can be avoided, this provides

little comfort to a strong determinist, since construing

Schrödinger evolution realistically involves accepting that

the fundamental *ontology of the world is irreducibly

probabilistic The determinist has two main options: to

regard the statistical element of quantum mechanics as

epistemic, a sign that the theory is incomplete, in the hope

that probability will be eliminated on discovery of a

hith-erto hidden variable; or to adopt an instrumentalist or

anti-realist stance towards the entities and processes the

theory describes According to one such approach, the

‘Copenhagen interpretation’, which is perhaps the

cur-rent orthodoxy in physics, we need not understand the

superposition of probable states that the Schrödinger

equation describes as assigning mutually incompatible

properties to the same entity, if observables, such as

loca-tion or momentum, exist only when a measurement is being

taken Thus, the determinist might argue, the

wave-function and its collapse are not objective features of

causal reality, and so are not genuine instances of ‘effects’

which lack deterministic causal antecedents

3 Quantum theory conflicts with intuitions about

*causality The *Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen paradox

presents a dilemma for quantum theory: either it is

incom-plete, or the presumption of the spatio-temporal locality of

physical interactions—the impossibility of *action at a

dis-tance—fails However *Bell’s theorem, in so far as his

inequalities have been empirically shown to be false,

shows that any hidden variable theory would also violate

locality (or another of Bell’s assumptions)

4 Supporters of ‘many-worlds’ interpretations of

quan-tum mechanics avoid both the indeterministic collapse of

the wave-function and action at a distance by maintaining

that each time a quantum experiment is performed with

different outcomes of non-zero probability, all outcomes

obtain, each in a different world Hence the universe

(everything that exists) incorporates many worlds, where

a world is understood as a totality of classically defined macroscopic objects which are perceived by a conscious observer as being in a definite state—a *cat is never both

alive and dead—and excludes microscopic entities which

might be in superposition, which explains why we do not experience superpositions The postulation of the exist-ence of many worlds has been compared to *Lewis’s modal realism—the metaphysical claim that *possible worlds exist in the same sense as the actual one—and has sometimes been taken to offer empirical support for it However, the many-worlds hypothesis currently lacks empirical confirmation, and there is doubt whether such confirmation is possible in principle It also postulates far fewer worlds than Lewis, who maintains that every logic-ally possible world exists

5 The peculiarities of quantum theory, or some exten-sion of it, are also invoked to provide accounts of *mind, specifically to explain *consciousness, because quantum events are causally relevant to the working of the brain, or cognitive processes can be modelled in terms of quantum computation Such approaches are hindered, however, both by the lack of consensus about the interpretation of quantum theory and by the absence of empirical evidence that quantum-theoretic phenomena are relevant to the

*Bell’s theorem; field theory; quantum logic

John Gribbin, Schrödinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality

(Lon-don, 1995)

Michael Lockwood, Mind, Brain and Quantum: The Compound ‘I’

(Oxford, 1989)

Christopher Norris, Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism: Philosophical Responses to Quantum Mechanics (London,

2002)

Henry P Stapp, Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics (New York,

1993)

quasi-memory.An artificial *memory concept, so defined that the quasi-rememberer need not have been the person

involved in the original event X quasi-remembers E if and only if E occurred, X apparently recalls something E-like,

and the apparent recalling causally depends on the

occur-rence E in an appropriate way This does not require that X witnessed E The point is to avoid circularity objections to

psychological analyses of *personal identity p.f.s

S Shoemaker, ‘Persons and their Pasts’, American Philosophical Quarterly (1970).

quasi-realismis a modern label for a position similar to Hume’s in which, although judgements have in fact no independent object, they nevertheless behave from the perspective of the judger as if they did More specifically, it

is the name of a research programme in which, without supposing an independent reality for a set of judgements

to be about, an attempt is made to explain and capture the same inferential relations between these judgements as they would have if they did have such independent

778 quantum theory and philosophy

*moral realism.

Simon Blackburn, Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford, 1993).

quasi-virtue:see shame.

quiddity.Historically meaning ‘essence’, ‘quiddity’ has

come to denote the unique nature, or ‘whatness’, of a

property According to ‘quidditism’ each property has its

own quiddity that distinguishes it from every other

prop-erty So two properties may be indiscernible (have the

same individuals falling under them and the same

higher-order properties holding over them) but nevertheless

dis-tinct (fail to be identical) because their quiddities differ

The rejection of quidditism is therefore equivalent to the

acceptance of the *identity of indiscernibles applied to the

*identity of indiscernibles; haecceity

Robert Black, ‘Against Quidditism’, Australasian Journal of

Philosophy, 78 (2000).

quietism, philosophical.The view, associated with the

later Wittgenstein, that philosophy should not aspire to

produce substantive theories (e.g of the nature of

mean-ing, the foundations of knowledge, or of the mind’s place

in the world), adjudicate disputes in science or

mathemat-ics, make discoveries, or dictate how language should be

used Philosophy’s proper role is therapeutic rather than

constructive: the philosopher diagnoses conceptual

con-fusions Although the results of such therapy can be

pro-foundly liberating, philosophy does not itself advance

human knowledge, but ‘leaves everything as it is’ d.bak

P M S Hacker, ‘Philosophy’, in Hans-Johann Glock (ed.),

Wittgenstein: A Critical Reader (Oxford, 2001).

Quine, Willard Van Orman (1908–2000) Probably the

most important American philosopher since the war,

Quine spent his career at Harvard University His

exten-sive writings have shaped the development of recent

phil-osophy, particularly in logic, the philosophy of language,

epistemology, and metaphysics After completing his

doc-torate, he visited the Vienna Circle, coming under the

influence of Rudolf Carnap Although critical of its

funda-mental doctrines, Quine remained true to the underlying

spirit of *Logical Positivism He shared its commitment to

*empiricism and to the belief that philosophy should be

pursued as part of science

The papers published in From a Logical Point of View

(1953) defended views about language and ontology,

chal-lenging the assumptions of the prevailing orthodoxy

After 1960, with the publication of Word and Object, Quine

emphasized his *naturalism, the doctrine that philosophy

should be pursued as part of natural science Pursuit of

Truth (1990) is a clear, concise formulation of his

philo-sophical position

Most modern empiricists had held that the meanings

of everyday and scientific propositions determine which

experiences count as evidence for or against them:

there are *analytic truths (truths which hold by virtue of meanings) which record these links with experience and guide us in forming our opinions ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (1953) rejected this picture: experience counts for or against our entire body of beliefs in a holistic manner, and little that is systematic can be said about the meanings of particular sentences The analytic– synthetic distinction is to be abandoned, and with it the idea that mathematics and logic have a status radically dis-tinct from that of empirical science: ‘Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system.’ We can even retain

an ordinary belief about our surroundings in the face of contrary experience ‘by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws’ (p 43)

In Word and Object, this denial that anything systematic

can be said about the meanings of particular sentences leads to Quine’s most famous doctrine, the *indeter-minacy of translation We undertake ‘radical translation’ when we attempt to translate a previously unknown lan-guage, relying only on information about the evidence that native speakers take to be relevant to the truth or fal-sity of their utterances Quine argued that many alterna-tive translation manuals will always fit the evidence, there being no fact of the matter which is correct There are no objective facts about which words and sentences have the same *meanings

Among the consequences of these views about mean-ing is a deep scepticism about the possibility of *modal logic, and the doctrine of ontological relativity The ontol-ogy of a theory is the range of objects that must exist if the theory is true; Quine holds that we can state the ontology

of a theory only relative to a translation manual and a background language There is no non-relative fact of the matter what the ontology of a theory is; or indeed what the ontology of any theorist is

Quine’s own ontological taste is for *physicalism: the physical facts are all the facts, all changes in the world involving physical changes And this helps to support his philosophical naturalism The philosophical study of knowledge, for example, is a branch of natural science, drawing on psychology to explain how sensory stimula-tion gives rise to scientific beliefs Controversy has sur-rounded the claim of naturalized epistemology that our philosophical needs are met by such a study: some have objected that it changes the subject by failing to address

*scepticism directly, or by focusing on how we do form

our opinions rather than on normative questions of how

*contextual definition; indeterminacy of meaning; American philosophy, today

W V Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass.,

1953)

—— Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).

—— Pursuit of Truth (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).

R Gibson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Quine (Cambridge,

2004)

Quine, Willard Van Orman 779